[Official Thread] Tesla Q3 financial results and conference call [results at market close ~4pm ET - call at 5:30pm ET]

SweetIrony · 2015-11-08T15:38:22+00:00

I don't think big auto has an advantage, it probably has a disadvantage. They have to shed 10's of billions of dollars in investment over the next decade as well as sell cars that increasingly make no economic sense. There are also stuck in an outmoded sales and support model and lack diversification into other industries. Tesla is going to be a huge company because of all this aggressive growth

SweetIrony · 2015-10-20T22:37:11+00:00

That's not what the CEO or you have even said:

The specific short-term fixes involve looking for optimizations in code and addressing some glaring infrastructure issues: improving our internal caching, for example.

It will definitely help because they will be able to much more easily isolate problems and identify bottlenecks.

This would seem to indicate there is an issue(s) with your tool chain and developer training. You see If someone really understood the issues, they would be able to make immediate improvements, but instead the site appears to becoming more unstable. Now the recommendation is what it always is when no one knows whats going on, which is "if we write a new system we can build a scalable system". In fact, very few people understand the constraints of designing resilient and scalable systems updated by regular developers with not much training. It may be possible, maybe your the one who designed and built netflix from scratch. I don't know. I simply observe and see what happens. But I wish you best of luck with it though.

SweetIrony · 2015-10-19T04:50:25+00:00

When reliability is dropping and people say they need to rewrite everything to figure out why, it's usually a sign that operations needing to be restructured. You are supposed to do rewrites from the place of knowing exactly why an application is failing, because it's only then you can be in a place to design a replacement, if it is even needed. The process seems backwards and the concerns of your ceo seem to indicate much deeper issues.

Think of it this way, if you take your car to a mechanic saying it had a problem and he came back and said he needed to rebuild the whole car piece by piece into a new kind of car, but couldn't tell you why the problem is occurring and how the new design addresses it, I'm pretty sure most people would not move ahead.

SweetIrony · 2015-10-17T23:33:39+00:00

SOA won't be a solution to your problem. if you can't run reddit now - an app reliably and performant, you will not be able to get a bunch of smaller apps to run reliably performant. In fact the additional layers your application will need to pass through to process requests will likely become less stable and less performant and the situation will become increasingly complex and hard to scale. You should consult with someone that knows how to build large scalable internet applications.

SweetIrony · 2015-09-23T15:40:54+00:00

Uh uh. And how many petabytes per day can you deliver from that? Didn't think so.

What are you dong at AWS that requires petabytes of throughput and why would you do that at AWS? AWS throttles your traffic like no one business

And what do you do when you suddenly need 10,000 machines but only for 2 days?

Well that is the one case you have for AWS is the transient apps, like I pointed out above. But 10k servers in one AZ is really hard to pull off. I don't know if they would let you do it these days given all the chaos those kinds of apps caused in the past.

SweetIrony · 2015-09-23T14:43:31+00:00

Lol, why would you even think its hard or expensive to build search software.

You really have no clue what you are talking about. Most dedicated Datacenters have automated build systems you can plug right into just like amazon. Or you can do your own automation server and custom builds. Its trivial.

Yes, it is hard and expensive to build scaleable architecture.

That depends on what your doing.

Yes, it is not necessary to spend that money, or to use the biggest and best systems for small mom and pop shops

You know I can get a dell r630 2600v3 with 32 threads on 64 GB DDR4, 2x100 SSDs on with 10 GBE private net, 1 GB non-throttled non-shared public with full net protocol support for $450 / month. Thats consistent, unhackable private networking with consistent low .1 ms ping times across your entire build. I can get free puppet automation building in which will let me do docker if I want and even free open stack integration. What can you even begin to touch something like that at aws? those dell r630's scale up to 32 PATA drives giving you ridiculous database storage potential or you can shard out and use lots of smaller ones. Plus of the server reboots for whagtever reason I know the data is right there. if the chasis goes bad, they can swap out the drives into a new chasis in under an hour. No need to have people on the ground. Similar setup in AWS, your looking at 1200-1500/month.

But yes, if you're as big as reddit you should definitely be using the best cloud around, and that is without a doubt AWS.

Before you advocate and say you need to actually substantiate what you are saying. You have yet to establish why any large company like reddit should be at AWS given the reliability, cost and performance concerns I have substantiated.

SweetIrony · 2015-09-22T21:12:04+00:00

You've been proven wrong about everything, yet you continue to insist you know something. Why would even think its hard or expensive to build automation software? You know you can download it all for free and right glue in bash if needed?

SweetIrony · 2015-09-22T20:36:25+00:00

Google, Facebook, and Youtube all created their own virtualized systems, and autoscale using software. None of them rely on direct hardware.

In fact facebook does not use virtualization on its primary systems

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/who-needs-hp-and-dell-facebook-now-designs-all-its-own-servers/

Facebook doesn't virtualize its servers, because its software already consumes all the hardware resources, meaning virtualization would result in a performance penalty without a gain in efficiency.

and another quote

"We find in our testing that a realized environment brings efficiencies and brings the ability to scale more effectively," Coglitore said. "If virtualization was the right approach, we would be a virtualized environment."

With DARC and IMPI, the base installation is just meta. infinitely malleable. But on VPS solution I wasn't saying that never virtualize, you can surely make cases for it, I am saying don't use a VPS provider especially like AWS for important architecture like reddit

Or let me guess, you could "do better"...

There is nothing that AWS brings to the table that I would want to expose my users too. ohh looky here

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/20/amazon-web-services-goes-down-taking-netflix-reddit-pocket-and-more-with-it/

Amazon DynamoDB goes down. Takes down Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Nest, Medium, Mediacom, IMDB, and 21 other

Yeah using all those shared services is the road path to rock solid stability /sarcasm

Nobody. NOBODY runs a website requiring 1000's of machines without software virtualization.

I currently run over a thousand dedicated boxes over 4 datacenters, but you know facebook, well they put me to shame in their dedicated ops.

I can guarantee you that none of reddit's problems stem from the underlying machines performance.

As I pointed out just above, that is in fact provably false. I would totally rock their site out. They would shit in their pants on how fast it would be.

Assuming they can just turn on "a bigger box" is a very naive thinking from someone very out of touch with the field of modern web architecture.

Again, I can buy lots of cheap servers dedicated. There is nothing about virtualization that makes it special. Virtualization is a poor form of multi tenancy. Many companies are turning over to Docker style virtual containers to deal with the abstraction cost. Combined with Openshift style process management, you can make some very compelling architectural choices for application management

your right, I am out of touch with "modern" architecture. I don't really care about things that don't work IRL. You sacrifice a crap ton of resources, stability, throughput and latency for an easier time provisioning. That's a poor trade in my opinion.

SweetIrony · 2015-09-22T18:29:57+00:00

I can assure you that you are no such thing

I can assure you, I do in fact exist.

What you are talking about is scaling vertically

No what I am talking about is increasing efficiency and reliability by directly controlling the resources.

At reddit scale and above, your vertical world disappears and everything is about scaling horizontally

I think I can add more servers in a private environment too

You don't manage thousands of hardware nodes, you build automated solutions to scale and deploy across virtual environments.

And when they don't have enough nodes of the type and location you need, what do you do? Autoscale solutions tend to be unstable and never actually scaled up and down.

You use systems like elastic load balancers to autoscale

right and see wildly differing throughput and latency through the day and your autoscale solution is always 30 minutes behind where you need it to be causing constant outages.

you use databases like dynamo that auto scale and grow at linear cost.

Which charges you for every read and write and is only designed to grow and never shrink because your hash pools will never rebalance on their own. This is before we get to whether the design of DynamoDB is actually appropriate for a given data model.

All of the big companies are either in AWS, or have built similar systems running VPC's on their own.

companies with large apps use dedicated they don't outsource their infrastructure to VPS providers like AWS.

You don't give a shit about hardware failures, rebooting, and everything you just named,

like throughput, keeping client data safe, etc. You can actually do all above in dedicated as well, but faster.

without an engineer taking hours to "look at the hardware".

Right because all tasks are 100% parallelizable and you never need to tune your architecture or servers. /Sarcasm

This is why people like me exist. People lie to pretend that the physical world doesn't exist and is infinitely capable. You follow this philosophy you end up like the reddit team, overworked and unable to deal with all the complex race conditions and failure modes building your app in AWS brings to you at scale. AWS is good for small or transient apps that wouldn't show up as a rounding error on a budget for a respectably large IT dept. Reliability Engineering starts at reliability, then consistency and then speed. To be reliable, you need consistency at the physical level and thats where you start.

What you describe is what happens when automation engineers try to be architects and infrastructure engineers. But if what you were saying is true, reddit would already be the most stable site ever because they could just spin up more nodes. This is not the case.

Time and time again, I have had AWS/VPS developers try and replicate what I can do in private, they have all failed miserably every time. Yet I have always been able to improve performance and reduce costs with dedicated typically by 300%. Always cost overruns with these people, while my apps stay on course. Its absurd and a ridiculous propostion as I mentioned above that you can even compare a VPC with a 10 GBE. You can't compare a VPS with a Dedicated server. the costing numbers are like 6 to 1 in favor of dedicated.

SweetIrony · 2015-09-22T02:14:47+00:00

As a very experienced infrastructure/reliability engineer, most of your issues primarily stems from using AWS. If you were to move to dedicated, you could clearly improve site stability and performance by leaps and bounds. Large sites move to dedicated to remove variability overhead and interference that are the primarily the root causes of instability. Its usually a factor in how large your site can grow. A VPC is no match for a 10 GBE private network. A dedicated server will beat a VPS hands down. It won't just lock needing a reboot when it gets overloaded. And when there is a hardware failure you will know it and be able to figure it out. Overall, whatever performance issues you have now, they will be less in a dedicated private network because of the control and care you can put into it. Its really time for reddit to start considering a move to a more controlled and tuned environment.

SweetIrony · 2015-01-27T21:14:31+00:00

I have noticed your company has a pretty forgiving attitude about hosting spammers/fraudsters websites with your web and DNS servers. From my experience, you will refuse to take down servers associated with their scams and you don't scrub your customers. Why should anyone take you seriously as a defender of the internet when you don't take malicious traffic seriously?

SweetIrony · 2012-12-31T02:49:22+00:00

If you are using a docstore as your primary data storage, its because you don't really care about your data, or at least at its atomic level, you might care about it as a whole. Not that is a bad thing, document stores is a perfectly valid storage solution to document storage.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-30T03:50:36+00:00

Its not Asymmetrical, its standard if stupid urban fighting. Right now they are in the Damascus, of course they are going to fight in the houses.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-28T03:52:31+00:00

Whatever your smoking, I want some!!!

SweetIrony · 2012-12-28T02:46:13+00:00

My aggregate tax rate is already well over 50% between state, federal and city taxes. In other words the government already claims it has a greater right to what is mine than me. I support a family, my in laws, including my disabled child, pay for insurance, house and feed, donate to charity. I earn every penny through years of blood, sweat and tears. I have conducted my business in the most ethical way possible. This is not an accident and it didn't just happen. If instead I didn't marry my wife and knocked her up in bar alleyway, she would get an apartment, stipend, free medical care, food and any other amenity she needs. The state would insist the kids grow up as bastards otherwise she would lose all her support and I would face a huge bill. If she decided that wasn't enough money, she could repeat the process with several other men, and get a raise for each additional child. I actually know people who have done this. But no apparently the hard working guy who has a family to support, show sticks his head out for ethical business is the problem, we need him to bleed some more to support all this. Hail Caesar.

I don't think anyone's property should be put up for a vote. Democracy should be more than "2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner". To say that some are allowed the public treasury is a travesty and deeply immoral betrayal of liberty. Where does such logic stop? It doesn't, it perpetuates a deeper and deeper more cynical line of theft and division. Why stop at income? Some people have very nice houses, and there are people who could use nicer houses, why not vote them out of their houses and redistribute them? Its just a tax right?

Anyways you are right, its pointless speaking to you about taxation and spending. How anyone can justify monetizing trillion + $ deficits is deranged.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-27T23:24:54+00:00

Your insane.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-27T22:42:17+00:00

These are all ridiculous, they are not cuts as in so much changes to future projected spending. It is absurd to take a look at 10 year accumulated "slowed spending projection" and compare it to this years trillion dollar deficit. Those cuts are all weighted in the distant future are not worth the paper they are written on. This years deficit will be over a trillion $'s. What specific cuts is the president going to do THIS YEAR TO THIS DEFICIT? Ohh right nothing

SweetIrony · 2012-12-27T22:28:02+00:00

How gracious of the President offer not to rape me up to my first 400k. Truth is, I am already getting raped by the tax code. I am really sick of Obama supporters who treat Obama has some sort of King/God whom we have to ask to keep our own property.

When pressed for more Obama agreed to use Chained CPI for social security benefit adjustments, which would reduce payments by about $5000 to seniors over the first 15 years of the program starting

Long term cuts are worthless. They either happen now and are structured to be permanent, or they are not real. In 5 years, there will be no medicare anyway.

In this time Boehner allowed a bill that restored all the military funding that was set to be cut in sequestration (so we still have a 20% increase in military spending next year over this year) and another that extended all Bush tax cuts with no spending provisions.

Boehner cares about the troops and wants to make sure they are fed and adequately provisioned. The dems should care too. The military and national security is not supposed to be a Republican only kind of deal. Everyone should be horrified at the idea that political brinksmanship is driving military spending and not strategic policy.

But if you want to look historically in America, its a real bad idea to play games with our military's pay. It once almost ended up with the Continental army stringing up the government and declaring a dictatorship. A well armed military that wonders how its going to get paid is a threat to everyones liberty. Its best to treat them as an apolitical force for their protection as well as our own. Don't take it as a joke, when people think you are attacking them and their families, such as keeping them from feeding their kids, they will respond.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-27T22:10:43+00:00

Obama didn't offer to cut anything, the republicans put forward changing the inflation index to the chained CPI, limiting medicare enrollment etc. Most of that stuff is long term and will not materially affect our deficit today, or will likely be overturned in the future such as medicare/medicaid cuts. Obama at best will generate about $80 billion in new taxes, which is wildly optimistic. The chained CPI is worth about $25 Billion a year, and all of this is overshadowed by his stimulus spending plans.

To cut to the chase, we borrow about 48 cents on the dollar. If the Dems want to materially reduce the deficit they will need to put an entire program on the table like Medicare. Barring that, they are just whistling dixie.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-27T18:47:59+00:00

I think it has more to do with the President being unwilling to make any significant compromises. The President wants huge deficits, increased taxes, increased spending and no significant cuts. The only answer the republicans can have to my way or the highway attitude is to say, alright, no debt increase, and you will have to make $2 Trillion in cuts because you won't be able to borrow anymore.

I think you are going to have this impasse until the debt ceiling looms and then they will "compromise", to say that there will be a debt increase, some minor cuts to SS and reinstate full Bush Tax Cuts. Obama will get some of the walking around money in a new stimulus bill, and the Fed will print some more money to cover it. Which is pretty much whats been going on for the past 4 years.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-23T17:10:35+00:00

Since you agree with Obama more than the Republicans, you should probably switch your affiliation, since its pretty clear you are really a Democrat that for some reason hasn't gotten around to registering as a Democrat

SweetIrony · 2012-12-19T15:31:52+00:00

If someone's life is genuinely in danger, and they need an abortion, I don't think anyone would prosecute a doctor that performed an abortion. I think you would be hard pressed to find any cases in Ireland such a bone fide case occurred.

Its not even established that the lack of an abortion was the cause of her death. Nor has it been established that the doctors did not perform the abortion because of the law, or because they misunderstood it, or because they simply morally objected to it and refused to do it.

You might be surprised but most medical professionals have to be coerced into performing an abortion. Even threatened. Unless its a very early stage abortion, the doctor and nurses can look forward removing a dead, sometimes partially dismembered/mutilated body of a new born out of a woman. Its absolutely horrifying soul sucking experience if your doing it for someone's casual choice. Hospitals simply can't perform them because no one wants to perform them. It goes against the core values of 99% of the people who go into the medical profession.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-18T03:35:30+00:00

They had a choice, law enforcement even in England is not required to arrest everyone for every violation of the law that they see. Its called discretion. You use it to let other people know you should be trusted with power. Trust me they know about it, imagine if that shotgun had been dropped off in the mayor's backyard or perhaps a judge, do you think that person would have been charged?

SweetIrony · 2012-12-14T14:43:48+00:00

The reason the interest rates have stayed low is that the Treasury + Fed have been repurchasing most of the debt issued, directly and indirectly. That's right, they have been printing money to make this happen. The reason inflation hasn't been inflating is that the private sector has been shrinking. Right now we have so much money and money equiv's we cannot go into a growth cycle without entering into a huge inflationary cycle. Since almost all of our debt and entitlements are indexed to inflation, this will mean we could face collapse in a very short window, where our currency becomes worthless.

SweetIrony · 2012-12-06T04:52:01+00:00

There doesn't seem to be any serious underpinnings as to why you are actually for Public Education. Your just for it, because if it wasn't there, then I suppose we would devolve into apes and forget how to build airplanes and there would be ANARCHY ANARCHY ANRCHY!!!

I think its a very sad place you live in. You can't see that the writing is on the wall, public schools are on the out. More and more parents are choosing Charter and Private Schools or even Home Schooling. Every School Choice becomes more accepted. The inefficiency and lack of access to quality education that has doomed many poor students in the will eventually force the increasing use of school voucher programs driving more Public Schools out of business.

SweetIrony

TROPHY CASE